1932 National City Bank of New York Pictorial Map of New York City

Citibank at the Height of the Great Depression.

This is a 1932 National City Bank of New York map of New York City. The map was drawn to promote National City Bank - now known as Citibank - at the height of the Great Depression (1929 - 1939).

A Closer Look

Coverage embraces Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, with part of Staten Island included via an inset in the lower-right. Numerous vignettes are scattered throughout, illustrating historical moments and important sites, such as Fort Hamilton, Central Park, and Prospect Park. Some of the more interesting noted events and locations include the first windmill built on Long Island, the Battle of Long Island, the capture of Nathan Hale, Aaron Burr's house, Alexander Hamilton's house, and the house where Alexander Hamilton died. Named neighborhoods include Greenwich Village, Bowery, Chelsea, and Harlem in Manhattan, along with Red Hook, Flatlands, New Lots, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Astoria, and Jamaica. Despite the historical focus, the modern bridge infrastructure of the city is depicted, including the George Washington Bridge, which was opened only the previous year. The 81 locations identified numerically are branches of The National City Bank of New York, with the head office at 55 Wall Street marked by a large star.

The National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) and the Great Depression

Today's Citibank was founded in 1812 as the City Bank of New York by Colonel Samuel Osgood, the first Postmaster General of the U.S., whose home at 1 Cherry Street is recorded here as the '1st White House,' as Osgood offered it to George and Martha Washington to stay at until the capital was moved to Philadelphia in 1790. In the following decades, the bank became a national and even international financial giant, financing the War of 1812, the U.S. Civil War, and the Panama Canal. By the late 1920s, under the leadership of the ambitious Charles E. Mitchell (1877 - 1955), it had become the largest commercial bank in the world. Mitchell encouraged a culture of high-risk, high-reward banking that blurred the lines between stable commercial deposits and speculative investment banking, and has since been seen as a contributing factor to the 1929 stock market crash. When the stock market crashed in October of that year, National City Bank was hit harder than most due to its heavy exposure to the securities market. Public scrutiny of the bank's activities was a major catalyst for the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking.

Publication History and Census

This map was produced for the National City Bank of New York in 1932. No artist is named. The map is rare to the market. There were at least three printings of the map in different color schemes, sometimes listing all the bank's locations in New York City on the verso, though they are otherwise identical (see, for comparison, our HistoricalNYC-citybank-1932-2). We see a few institutional holdings, including the Brooklyn Historical Society, the David Rumsey Map Collection, and the PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography at Cornell University.

Condition

Good. Trimmed to neatline.

References

Rumsey, 9513.001. OCLC 41916734. Brooklyn Historical Society, NYC-1932.Fl. PJ Mode Collection, Cornell, 2350.02.